I thought it would be an interesting idea to have a presentation where we compared Smalltalk to one of our dynamic language cousins. Of these next kin it seemed to me that from the most popular languages that Ruby was the closest. So I approached the NYC Ruby chairperson, Patrick May. We met at the cafe at the New Yorker Hotel , right around from Suite LLC where we hold our meetings and for a couple hours we chatted but mostly went through the VisualWorks IDE. I brought a copy of VW 7.4 NC which I let him have. Patrick apparently has been a fan of Smalltalk but did not know quite where to start.

I wonder, has anybody written a “making the transition” type of tutorial i.e. that which understands that most new comers to Smalltalk will be used to file based environments and just unfamiliar with the “live” image concept that Smalltalk presents.

But I digress, details for our May presentation:

Date: June 7th, 2006

Location: 440 W. 9th Avenue, between 34th and 35th , 8th Fl

Time: 6:30 to approx 8:30

The presentation actually starts at 7pm , but there is an open house from 6:30 – 7pm.

Abstract:

Patrick May will give an introduction to the Ruby language, highlighting similarities and
differences from Smalltalk. He will also speak on the viability of Ruby in various
real-world scenarios

Bio:

Patrick May is a programmer, organiser, and artist. May is Director of Technology at
Rhizome.org, a new media arts community. Since 2002, he has been developing ruby-web,
a ruby environment optimised for the web. He has presented ruby-web at the 2002 and
2004 Ruby Conferences.

.

Perhaps some of you have noticed that NYC Smalltalk Wiki is not operational. Well, perhaps you all out there have not noticed but some of our regulars have. It seems that my ISP has shut all of my ports down. Probably not just me. It probably is now “policy”. This SUCKS !!!

BTW, I have a residential broadband account. It has sustained our wiki for at least 2 years. Are they all starting to do this? So the small people like me can’t run wikis from home. Forget about any independent P2P collaboration. P2P networks will definitely need to rely on super peers which means at the very least folks on business cable/dsl. But wait, some cable providers will give you a business cable account and they will very generously open 2 ports. What a joke.

I wonder what the motivation is. Are they trying to control spam/viruses better? Are the small fries of the world actually really impacting their bandwidth? Is this a money making squeeze to get us all to upgrade to business cable.

Maybe I’m screwing up. My newer NetGear router may be screwing up.

I used Shields UP from www.grc.com to check out my port “stealthness” or not. Unfortunately, Shield Up will only test a range of 64 ports at a time and I have to edit the port forwarding tables on the router as well to be able to test. Needless to say I only tested a couple ranges. I don’t know of a tool that will scan the entire port range. Even if there is such a tool, I obviously would need to connect a box directly to the cable modem. I think. I don’t believe there is a setting in my router to just allow all traffic through. Of course not. Through to where? Traffic has to go somewhere. Well, there is the “DMZ” option but I already tried that with one of my boxes.

All of this is such a hazzle and aggravation especially since it makes me so angry that I have to take time away from playing my guitar to handle this BS.

Action items:

1. Need at the very least a backup static site for NYC Smalltalk.
2. A link from the site to a url that would access the NYC Smalltalk blogs “Community” category, if possible.
3. Spend just a tiny little more time on testing what the issue really is.
4. Decide to bite the bullet and upgrade to a business cable setup that would allow me total access to my box. In other words just buy myself out of this hazzle.

Here are my notes from my trip to Smalltalk Solutions in Toronto:

• If you ask for a cappuccino at Tim Horton’s you will get regular coffee with milk, really.
• Don’t try to use your credit card at Tim’s.
• Tim Horton’s is the parallel universe counterpart to Dunkin Donuts.
• Coffee shops will serve your coffee in paper cups but without a lid. Why???
• Some coffee shops (Timothy’s) require that you pick out your paper cup and then hand it over to the coffee people.
• The Federal goverment charges sales tax on food and so does the state. I was told that it all adds up to about 15% and that of course does not include tip and of course also does not include the “foreign fee” your bank will charge you.
• Many, many restaurants in the downtown area have TVs in them.
• Brian Foote is a funny dude —most enjoyed presentation.
• Eliot has a funny laugh.
• Martin McClure bakes his own bread.
• Michael-Lucas Smith woke up at 4 am and then went to an Aikido session.
• I managed to get in decent amount of guitar time.
• Michael also slept through dessert last nite, really.
• Canadian Bob Nemec is the new Executive Director of STIC. I was told that he will decree that from now on all Smalltalk code must be written in both French and English.
• I am so “web-ed” out but for those that are not there was a lot of useful to potentially useful web technology on display.
• The crypto stuff, boy that was a snore
• Apparently, there are only 27,000 sunits for Pollock not 50,000 +
• Haddocks have loins.
• A NYC Smalltalker won the coding contest. So Andres, may be the coding contest experience would make a good topic for a presentation?
• Smalltalk Solutions 2007 will be in Toronto again.
• Country music and Hockey apparently mix well.
• Not convinced that we got a lot of exposure to non-Smalltalkers but I guess something is better than nothing. Perhaps better next year. More time to plan, more leverage with the organizers. Maybe.
• My most satisfying meal came out of a vending machine the very last nite. A “Vickies” Sea salt malt vinegar potato chip bag and some French orange-ade like beverage. Pretty good actually. I wonder if there are any Smalltalker gastrophiles (is that a word ?) i.e. Smalltalkers that like good food and I just mean good and not pretentiously expensive. Just one nice dinner would have sufficed.
• The Good, the bad and the ugly was a Clint Eastwood film before it was a Jeff Sutherland article. I would be more concerned to piss off Clint than Jeff.
• I guess overall the content seemed light but then again we had less slots to use because of the combined conference. Perhaps , next year we can elevate the technical content and spread it around, perhaps get more slots from the conference.
• We should avoid negative PR presentations.
• Some non-Smalltalker dude asked one of the vendors at the exhibit hall “what are objects”, boy what a flash back.
• I had a nice chat with the dark angel. Wants to show us stuff. Hmmm.
• I don’t believe anything got accomplished from the packaging BOF but I guess folks got to express their needs which is a good thing.
• I don’t fit well in a twin size bed.
• CanJet worked out pretty well. Will use them again.
• Overall, great to talk with people again face to face and it was great to see some faces I had not seen in a while.
• Happy to be home back in this fantastic city. Looking forward to Bruce’s presentation next week which I purposely missed at StS.

That all folks ….

NYC Smalltalk will have its next presentation on May 4th, 2006. Our dear friend and once upon regular British friend now living in Australia will bring us up to date on his long standing SkillBase system.

The OpenSkills SkillsBase system runs using an application server that
has the advanced features one would expect but with several unique
properties. Demonstrations will be interleaved throughout the talk.
The following is a small selection of the topics Bruce will include.
o No impedence missmatch when persisting objects
o Huge numbers of instances of the application are possible
o No HTTP session affinity required (i.e. apps can be RESTful)
o A cache of unmodified objects shared by all instances
o One language throughout the system
o Application code is executed in the databases processes …..
o The DBMS *is* the application server
o Premier IDE from which code is injected directly into the app server
… though we do use a staging area for production changes

Bruce Badger is an enthusiastic technologist and the Founder and
President of OpenSkills.org, a global non-profit association of
professional individuals. His strong technical leadership skills have
contributed to his success of a wide range of IT projects, over a
period of more than 25 years. He has built and deployed many systems
and libraries over the past 10 years, preferring to develop software
using Smalltalk, a pure Object Oriented language. Bruce is currently
focusing on the evolution of the services market as Free and Open
Source software is increasingly adopted. He has written a number of
Open Source libraries, and is currently engaged with building the
support systems for the OpenSkills association.

For more info pls checkout our wiki.

yes indeed.

Carl Gundel will stop by NYC Smalltalk this upcoming April 6th and present on Liberty BASIC a popular shareware BASIC IDE. He will discuss:

• Why Smalltalk
• The issues involved in building IDEs
• Pollock, the new GUI framework for VisualWorks which Liberty BASIC is utilizing.

Here is one screenshot:

and another

This is apparently the MAC look.

It should be fun. Please check in with our wiki for directions.

See you all there.

-Charles

Both James Robertson and Suzanne Fortman of Cincom Smalltalk attended. James was the presenter so the presentation focused mostly on the VisualWorks product roadmap. However, the fact that Suzanne attended meant that we got to ask some marketing related questions. The presentation slides can be found here. However, to access these you will have to join our yahoo group which takes no time.

In anycase, here is my recap:

The Product

• Lot of emphasis on integrating VisualWorks with ObjectStudio
• OS developers get to run on VW a faster VM and much better IDE including StORE source code control.
• VW developers get to use some interesting ActiveX embedding technology and native widgets on Windows of course.
• This also allows ObjectStudio clients to leverage their investment in OS but also provides them with a forward path into VisualWorks
• My impression was that there is no interest in advancing ObjectStudio per se i.e. beyond the integration effort with VisualWorks. That makes sense to me.
• More platform support including the Windows CE / PocketPC platforms
• 64 bit support for Linux and Solaris, holding off on 64 bit on Windows
• Smalltalk Runtime Environment build up deployment mechanism is supposedly a major area of focus. Unfortunately, this is to be spread over the “next” major releases. I think that most of us feel that this should be a focus of the very next release. A lot would be accomplished if Cincom “component-ized” the rest of their IDE and kernel into parcels which should not be a big job.
• Pollock is of course on the plate now advancing into incorporating Splash which is Pollock’s version of the UI Painter to be simplistic.
• Glorp , the object – relational mapping tool which is a next generation TopLink or better said a re-thought out and re-architecture of that problem space will be officially supported by end of year 2006.

The Marketing

I had a chance to speak to James and Suzzane about this. The general gist was it is “not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” i.e. you are not going to see Cincom actively marketing Smalltalk i.e. at least not in the traditional ways i.e. through a visible magazine ad campaign for example. They just don’t have the budget nor could they ever compete with somebody like IBM and SUN etc. Rather, its the Smalltalk community that should be actively promoting Smalltalk. Well, I agree but easier said than done. One suggestion that I had which I had brought up before to STIC was to somehow facilitate the creation and sustain of more “active” Smalltalk user groups by helping with presentations, sponsoring or finding sponsors for user groups i.e. corporations , academic institutions that would be willing to provide time and meeting space for STUG meetings. I was told that they already do some of that. Certainly, Cincom has always been very supportive of NYC Smalltalk. However, I really don’t see many “active” user groups i.e. groups that meet at least six times a year. It has gotten better in the last past two years but we still need more activity. It is important to have a “local” Smalltalk presence. I would suggest that all Smalltalk user groups advertize their meetings at the very least in comp.lang.smalltalk. This will encourage others to start groups. If you want to start a Smalltalk user’s group don’t be shy. Call Cincom who has expressed their willingness to help and ask them to help you find a meeting venue, they have many contacts. If you happen to live in an area where a Cincom engineer lives I’m sure that said engineer and that Cincom Smalltalk would be very happy to help your group with a commitment to one presentation per year.

If any NYC Smalltalk member would like to add any comments or to make any corrections please feel free to add a comment to this blog.

Our next presentation scheduled for the first week in April will feature Liberty BASIC , a BASIC IDE written in Smalltalk. More later.

James Robertson , which most readers will recognize as the Cincom Smalltalk product manager and the lead developer for BottomFeeder will grace us with a visit. He will discuss what ‘s new in 7.4 and the VisualWorks roadmap for the year and beyond. He promises to bring a bunch of 7.4 non-commercial CDs.

I will soon update our wiki with the details. The meeting will be held on Wednesday, March 1st. Emails will be sent to our Yahoo group members. Instructions on how to join our group can be found on the wiki.

See you all there.

If I had my way Gemstone/S would be a primary component of any enterprise application I was involved with. There is simply no better way of storing your objects that in an object database. Gemstone goes further since for one it also behaves as an app server. “Stored Procedures” are simply just good ole methods. One essentially gets to persist the object model. There is no painful object relational mapping but distributed objects between clients and Gemstone . Queries basically work the same way as iterating over standard Smalltalk collections work. There is of course, special optimised support for various uses but what it boils down to is that Gemstone is simply a much simpler way than the rdms based alternatives.

I was lucky enough to have spent over 5 years working with Gemstone on large enterprise apps for the utility industry. One of the apps involved using Gemstone with a GIS, which was a lot of fun. Gemstone is not “new” technology. It is just extremely current , relevant, modern technology. It has been used commercially since at least the early 90’s. Many strategic mission critical applications have been built with Gemstone. Florida Power & Light where I started my Smalltalk career uses it in a number of apps including their Emergency response system i.e. that which handles hurricanes. JP Morgan has a large bread and butter financial framework built with Gemstone. Right down the street from me a huge Japanese multinational uses Gemstone to support its transportation business. These are just a few examples.

Its been a while since Gemstone has presented to NYC Smalltalk. One of the most noteworthy news is that Gemstone/S is now 64 bit which just blows open many of the scalability thresholds for a system that was already very scalable.

Norm Green of Gemstone will present on February 1st, 2006. Please visit our wiki for further details and directions.

David Siegel will present next on Wednesday, December 7th, 2005. Here is the abstract and bio:

Abstract:

An introduction to a family of algorithms whose uses include approximate string matching, spelling correction, synchronizing sequences, and analysis of DNA and protein data.

Bio:

David Siegel has been working with objects for over twenty years. His interests include language design, algorithms, data structures, persistence and concurrency.

If I may I would like to elaborate a bit further on our colleague. David is one of our long standing regulars at NYC Smalltalk. As a matter of fact, many of David’s twenty years include quite a bit of Smalltalk and quite a bit of OODMS specifically Gemstone. Its probably accurate to say that he is “famous” for his work as one of the main architects on large Gemstone project but I’m not going to mention the name of said project since he does not bring it up.

Elegant OO designs in languages as Smalltalk can often make up for the brute force approaches that is typical to “closer to the metal” languages. Isolating the right algorithm primitives and implementing just those in an External C library can provide for an implementation that meets performance requirements but also one that is extensible. Of course, we believe that using Smalltalk just makes all of the above easier .

BTW, a great follow up presentation would be one that deals with the VisualWorks pluging framework i.e. that framework which allows one to code Smalltalk and then compile it to C and subsequently make it accessible to the virtual machine.

Directions to the meeting can be found on our wiki.

Daniel Antion has been for the last two years an active member of NYC Smalltalk. Dan lives and works out in Conneticut but makes the time to visit NYC for our presentations and stays around for drinks while we all meet at the the hotel bar to discuss everything Smalltalk.

For our next meeting Dan will talk about how Smalltalk has been a business enabler to his organization.

Here is what Dan had to say about the presentation:

“Specifically, I would like to talk about the ways in which Smalltalk has enabled ANI to quickly respond to business and regulatory requirements. The rapid develvopment cycles combined with abundent tools and the ability to reuse and extend our objects as well as the environment has allowed us to tackle some large projectss and a variety of small projects with a very small staff.

Part of the presentation focuses on highlighting the language capabilities by addressing small, less critical projects than developers normally talk about. Building support for a language, in my experience, can’t be confined to large projects only.”

Some facts about Dan:

“Daniel Antion is Vice President, Information Services for American Nuclear Insurers. He is responsible for all systems development activities in addition to managing general information technology efforts. Prior to joining ANI, he worked in systems development for several companies. He also worked as a consultant for Coopers & Lybrand and KPMG Peat Marwick, specializing in information systems and consulting services to financial institutions. An enthusiastic fan of Smalltalk, Dan has made presentations at Smalltalk Solutions and OOPSLA.”

Hope to see you all there.

-Charles